[Doc-SIG] Last Friday, "groups", washing machines - addendum

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

One important thing I forgot to say:

It is not possible to insert a <group> into a DPS tree by use of reST
alone (well, subject to not doing sophisticated/complicated substitions
a la Jaffray - but that's such an escape clause I shall ignore it). That
is, there is no reST "spelling" of <group>.

<group> elements are *only* intended to be inserted by things which
manipulate the DPS tree directly - i.e., linkers and trasformers.

Furthermore, a "plain" DPS writer is perfectly at liberty (and may
perhaps be expected) to treat a <group> element as if it had no
representation - for instance, in my own "plain" HTML Writer class::

    def write_group(self,element,stream):
        """By default, we don't do anything with <group> tags.
        """
        for node in element:
            self.write_html(node,stream)

Alternatively (in HTML output) a reasonable response would be to
translate it to <div> or <span> as appropriate - but that is *not
requried*.

Tibs

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Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.co.uk/
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